The Breast And The Fruit Garden

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I wrote that poem before setting up Balsall Heath Jungle in 1999, even before setting up its predecessor, a lunchtime gardening club at Tindal School, in 1998. It was inspired by the experience of planting raspberries in our small back garden, and watching babies and toddlers pick them and put them straight in their mouths. It seemed such a contrast to buying baby food in a tin or a jar, or the food children are given at parties, or even eating raspberries with sugar and cream from a bowl. There was a direct palpable connection between the earth the raspberries were growing from, and the person standing on the same patch of earth. It was as if the garden became the mother feeding the child, and I would guess that a lot of fruit has about the same degree of sweetness as breastmilk.

I wanted a Balsall Heath fit for children to grow up in, and for me that meant more trees, more plants, and less exhaust fumes. I was bred in the suburbs in the twentieth century, and I probably wouldn't survive long in a post-industrial age. I love technology, particularly computers and well-crafted bicycles. But I don't want my children to grow up with half their brain unengaged, the half that responds to the woods and the sky and the soil, that gives the hands their skill, that roots us and grounds us in a place on a planet which is our home, not a disposable hotel. And I want to tear myself away from the computer screen and dig into all that too. I had no desire to go and build a little house on the prairie or in a national park: I wanted to dig and delve in the place that was already my home, but not in isolation, I wanted to be part of a digging and delving community.

After a year of thinking about it, and another year of running a lunchtime garden club at a local school, I plucked up the courage to make it all official, to make an honest woman of this desire of mine and give the child a name. It seemed important enough to beg friends and family for money to get started, and worthwhile enough to go through all the rigmarole of setting up an organisation with a constitution, a bank account, a premises, a committee, an Annual General Meeting, and a name, Jungle, which means forest in English, Urdu, Panjabi and Hindi.

In the early years I often felt isolated. I often felt that I was carrying all the responsibility, and often doing all the work too. I sometimes wondered if Balsall Heath Jungle was a figment of my imagination, and all the people who said it was a great idea meant precisely that: a great idea which hadn't yet sprouted from the ground. I was mistaken. I forgot to feel the full force of the shoulders I was standing on and the hands that were holding mine: each generous donor, the three friends who gave up their time to form the first committee, the girl in the lunchtime club who said "Wicked" when she pulled up her first ever carrots from amongst the weeds, the first person to become a member just because I knocked on his door with a leaflet, the artist who drew my hands to make our logo, the funders who checked out each application and gave us the thumbs up, everyone who believed in what we were doing and encouraged us to go on. Without this web of support Jungle wouldn't have lasted five minutes. And where would I be without the tolerance of my partner, who has put up with my obsessive way of working, and my resolute refusal at times to earn money, or the tolerance of my co-workers for my strange moods and confusingly inconsistent perfectionism? By the way, alothough I like to talk a lot about gardening, its my partner who drags me out in the spring to get started.

So now this Jungle, this forest of life, has a life all its own and even I can't go on ignoring the fact that it's "we" and not "I". Included in the community with the members and the volunteers and the workers are the fruit trees we've pruned or encouraged people to plant, and the three year olds and four year olds who have dared to get their hands dirty or touch a worm.

In a very special sense Balsall Heath Jungle is nothing special. With us or without us, people in Balsall Heath grow veg, plant apple trees, and even keep chickens. It's a page in the book of a multi-faceted community, and we are not the only group in the area to encourage people to grow in stature and to grow together by growing plants. It's a finger pointing at the garden, reminding people that weeds grow in the cracks between paving stones not to mock the builder who laid them, but to give us a taste of the earth.

Berries drip to the floor -
nature is generous.
Children pluck them when
desire is the foretaste of the redness of their texture
dissolving on the tongue
or when hunger calls from within.
They brush against the tender leaves and branches,
enfolded in the garden's green embrace.

Others bottle them for sale
boiled, dried, powdered, packaged, sugared and coloured,
a plastic breast on the supermarket shelves.

'Others' could be children too,
if some of those hard-minted coins
slipped through their nylon pockets onto the soil
to become pebbles and grit in the rich roots of the berries
where the soil is lively with sweet-rotting baby poo.

Chris Duggan

Last Modified 9/9/05 10:57 PM